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Silverdome sold for less than a studio apartment in Manhattan

And we have a winner in the Pontiac Silverdome auction: A Toronto-based real estate company won the 34-year-old former home of the Detroit Lions with a bid of $583,000, or just over 1% of what it cost to build originally. Even though the price was low, getting the stadium into private hands was important for Pontiac’s financial health, according to Fred Leeb, the city’s emergency manager. “Even I have to admit that the number is lower than I would like,” Fred Leeb, Pontiac’s state-appointed emergency financial manager, told the Wall Street Journal. “But I’m happy that we made the decision. Procrastination was literally costing us millions of dollars.”

The names of the Silverdome’s new owners weren’t revealed, but Leeb did say that they plan on using the dome for a Major League Soccer franchise, as well as a pro women’s soccer team. That’s a bit odd, given MLS’s increasing insistence that its teams play in soccer-only stadiums, but I guess at that price, the Toronto group can afford to buy a stadium that it plans to throw away in a couple of years.

Seems doubtful that MLS would ever play at the Silverdome. The most recent teams have been requiring either a soccer specific stadium like Toronto and Portland or a larger stadium that’s heavily modified or designed for soccer like Vancouver and Seattle. The Silverdome is neither as it stands and will require more money to modify than it would to demolish it and build a new stadium that is more suited to soccer.

Which ignores the fact that to date the MLS has shown no interest in the Detroit market. Their most recent mentioned targets are Montreal, Florida and a second NY team.

Now the Division 2 USL has recently mentioned that Detroit is going to be an expansion city in that league. But the Silverdome is about 75,000 seats too big for a USL team’s average crowd.